That's really funny, just 6 months or so ago MSE was rated at #5 at the time, and Kaspersky was rated at #3.

They're all in big competition with each other for 1st place, which is good for all of us. I remember before Norton was bought out by Symantec that it was the best of the best and was the only one I would use. After the buyout they tanked in the ratings. I was having all kinds of problems with software compatibility, plus it was bogging my computer down to a crawl. Not to mention all the crashes and freezes. That's when I discovered that Symantec had lousy customer support. When my license was expired a couple of months later, I went over to Kaspersky until they started having major problems. I think they were bought out by some other big company too. Anyhow, they started using anti-competitive practices and make it where you couldn't even install or update their software as long as you had Spybot S&D installed on your computer, even if it isn't being used at the time. Spybot's web site had a big article about this and was issuing and "Cease and Desist" to Kaspersky to stop this practice, in which they ignored.

Below is an article I submitted about Symantec years ago....

Consumer Watch reply:

Contributing Editor Anne Kandra helps you avoid the gotchas and pitfalls of buying and using technology products.

Consumer Watch: Upgrade That Application--or Else!

More software vendors are forcing users to buy upgrades they don't want.

In reading your article "Consumer Watch: Upgrade That Application" opened up an old wound for me with Symantec. It's one thing to stop offering support for the program itself, but to stop the customer from getting virus updates is a horse of another color. There's no reason to stop supporting virus definition updates other than to force a customer to upgrade to their newest software. And with Norton Utilities, every year an upgrade is actually a downgrade as they remove a utility or two from the works every year. Imagine my surprise when I can't find the registry cleaner utility, among others, with this new "upgraded" software.
Symantec is the King of this tactic, as I found out over the last couple of years. I'm working on my 3rd upgrade with them now, and I can assure you it will be the last. Not only does Symantec stop supporting their not so old software on a regular basis, but even with the new upgrades the chances of you getting any support is about slim to none. I have contacted Symantec more than four times since I upgraded to SystemWorks 2005 Premier, and have yet to receive a reply. And this was using their on-site support form.
I have also come to find out since my last downgrade of SystemWorks, that they aren't the best on the market now, not even close! Since I made the choice to dump Norton, I have discovered fine software to replace it with that is far superior to anything that Norton currently publishes, with aShampoo Magic Defrag being the main choice for the disk defragging replacement.
With Norton, my 80gb hard drive would take over 4 hours to defrag, and that's with all the unnecessary background task killed, and even then my "tweaked" computer is slowed to a crawl. Still, the best that it can defrag my drive leaves anywhere from 25 to 30% of fragmented files. With Magic Defrag, the program runs in the background contantly with no CPU overhead at all, and no noticeable memory loss. It stays paused until the system isn't using any CPU time, then it goes into action, and in a matter of minutes it is finished with only 6% of the files fragmented, and that is non movable system files.
I could go on and on about other superior software, with a lot of them being freeware. The bottom line is this, if your paying for Symantec software, your paying for non-supportable and short lived trash. And that is a shame, Norton used to be the name when it came to system utilities.